Non-volatile memory systems, such as flash memory, have been widely adopted for use in consumer products. Flash memory may be found in different forms, for example in the form of a portable memory card that can be carried between host devices or as a solid state disk (SSD) embedded in a host device. Identification of the endurance for blocks of memory may be necessary for decreasing the risk of losing stored data by writing to a block of memory that exceeded its estimated endurance. Flash erase cycle endurance may be limited based on the worst block in a system, which may limit the flash system reliability and write performance. For example, during wear-leveling, the controller may keep a count of the number of erase cycles each physical block endures and distributes new programs amongst the blocks such that all physical blocks reach the worst block's (i.e. lowest endurance block) cycle limit at approximately the same time. In other words, all blocks are ideally utilized (i.e. worn out) approximately equally until the lowest endurance block's limit is reached. Each system (e.g. card) may be limited by the block with the minimum intrinsic endurance. Once all blocks reached the specified cycle limit, further cycles implied that some blocks would not meet the minimum data retention requirement and the system may be considered unreliable.